My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

I started writing as a child. But I didn't think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something - no, maybe junior - and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

I believe you mother everybody, not in a cloying, hovering way, but taking care of what is around you.